Trouble

I haven't seen her in weeks. Every day on Lexington Avenue, a block from my office, she'd sit on one of those padded walker-chairs beside a pay phone. I always tried not to stare. She had a short halo of blonde curls in the back, while the hair across her forehead lay perfectly flat, as if pressed there by hand. Sometimes she'd look up and smile. I always smiled back. It crossed my mind more than once to take her picture, but if she caught me, I'd feel as though I'd violated

If I close the door at the bottom of the steep service stairs that lead from the bedrooms to the kitchen, it blocks out the distant light from the Gaffers and Sattler stove, making the stairwell itself a pitch-black downward tunnel. The last thing I do before I corral the dogs into the bedroom is to close the top door to that staircase, the lip of that first stair just a toe’s length away from a very bumpy and painful decline. You’ll never know what hit you. I may not hear yo

It was about half past midnight and I was four beers deep when I left El Saalam, one of the few clubs that serves liquor off of Jemaa el-Fnaa, the place where I shot this video. Halfway home, a guy saw me checking my map and offered to help. I read on guide sites that this was a popular scam, I just kept walking. He followed as a friend joined him, two on my tail. I kept ignoring them, the twisty alleyways were dark, all of the shops closed. The only others out seemed to know

I celebrated my second anniversary in New York City by discovering I had a father. I was riding the packed 4 train downtown. Howard and Robin were laughing in one ear. And a woman's crotch-level pointy purse making me wish I'd worn a cup from the other direction. “You’re my son. You’re my son. You’re my son.” I couldn’t quite hear him at first, but you know that feeling you get when someone is staring right at you? I looked up into a gaze of hate, his mouth moving, his stage

Comedy World had to have been one the best jobs ever for anyone who worked there. Housed in a giant warehouse on the remote outskirts of Playa Vista, we did live comedy radio 24/7, streaming audio and video until we landed in about 33 terrestrial markets. Inside the warehouse, we constructed a trailer park, each show having its own trailer with one broadcast studio and one video/green screen set-up that, for the time, was revolutionary. We all knew it was a great job and we a

Within an hour of meeting Joe Franciosi, he removed his glass eye and handed it to me. Not metaphorically. One minute we were talking shop and the next there was an eyeball sitting in his palm like he'd just won it at a carnival. That was Joe. Most people spend years deciding how much of themselves to reveal. Joe took the express lane. We met during the Comedy World years, back when everyone seemed convinced they were about to reinvent radio. The network's logo featured a bom

I didn’t know Mario, didn’t even know his name. The only thing I knew was that on Memorial Day, I saw a crowd of people standing on the corner of the 7-Eleven where I stop every morning for my Super Big Gulp. Some had their fingers jammed in the air pointing at something or someone, and then I heard sirens behind me coming up fast. I pulled over just long enough to see a shirtless man lying on the ground, his muscular back covered in a tattooed giant cross of Christ, and as I

There’s a black Miata parked right in front of my house taking up prime parking real estate underneath the bird-shit factory, an enormous fichus tree that must’ve escaped someone’s living room in the Twenties and laid its roots by the curb. The little car has a broken convertible top so its owner secures Saran Wrap over it with two-liter soda pop bottles filled with water. When I pulled into my driveway on Thursday evening, it was dusk, and I saw an older Black man in a choco